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The Big Share: March 3, 2015

Ruth Conniff

Ruth Conniff is the Editor of the Progressive Magazine. A native of Madison, WIsconsin, she first joined the magazine when she was hired as a summer intern by the late Erwin Knoll after her sophomore year at Yale. Shortly after graduating from college in 1990, she came to work as Associate Editor for the Progressive, becoming Washington Editor and opening the Progressive's Washington, DC, office in 1997. During the 1990s, Conniff covered welfare reform in Wisconsin and around the country, as well as the drug war in Colombia, and other topics, including women's sports (an avid runner, Conniff coached her old high school track and cross-country teams at Madison East High School for many years).In Washington, Conniff became a regular on TV pundit shows on CNN, Fox News, and PBS. She still appears frequently on PBS's To The Contrary and on the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC.Conniff was the recipient of an "Editor's Choice" award from Madison Magazine for her coverage of the Wisconsin Uprising in 2011. Her Progressive Magazine feature story on school privatization is a chapter in the book "It Happened in Wisconsin" recently published by Verso.Today Conniff lives in Madison with her husband and three daughters, who marched on the Capitol with their teachers from the Madison Public Schools.From The Progressive's Rally - Ruth Conniff Twitter | RSS

Scott Walker appeared on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning to defend himself against Thursday’s bombshell national news story that he is at the center of a “criminal scheme” to evade campaign finance law.

Tonight the Millwaukee-based Bradley Foundation—“the most powerful rightwing organization in America no one seems to know about,” as one progressive activist describes it—will present awards worth $250,000 in prize money each to conservative journalists at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

By Wendell Berry

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).